'Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, Who Cares? Call Them Racists'

In a new post on the PJM homepage, Rand Simberg spots something I hadn't noticed when I blearily linked to the Daily Caller item on the JournoList during the Fitzgerald hour of 3:00 AM last night:

For a long time, while the bias in the media has always been obvious, I’ve always assumed that it was something in the water around the media coolers -- that these people all lived in a self-reinforcing cocoon, marinating in confirmation bias, in which the correct attitudes were subtly rewarded, and the incorrect ones not-so-subtly punished. If someone had told me that they actively conspired to drive the message, trumpet and even make up stories that served their narrative, and suppress those that didn’t, or undermined it, I would have said that it was both unnecessary, and that even they weren’t that stupid.

During the campaign, it almost looked as though there were a media conspiracy to avoid discussion of Jeremiah Wright. Well, now we know why. Simply put, there literally was.

But the ugliest thing is this:

Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares -- and call them racists.”

Emphasis mine.

Which is remarkable -- in an effort to smear everyone to the right of Obama as racist, Ackerman is apparently admitting that half the country all looks alike to him. (And ultimately, it really was anyone even marginally to Obama's right who were smeared as racists that year, as Bill, Hillary, Geraldine Ferraro, and heck, the voters in Pennsylvania's Democratic primary can all attest.)